Koko
is a 34 year-old lowland gorilla who learned to communicate with
American
Sign Language when she was just a
baby. Her teacher, Dr. Penny Patterson, began working
with Koko as a Ph.D. project
at Stanford, thinking it would only be a 4-year study.
Thirty-some years later, Penny and
Koko continue to work together at the Gorilla Foundation in one of the longest
interspecies communication studies ever conducted, the only one with
gorillas. Koko now has a vocabulary of over 1000
signs, and understands even more spoken English.
